White Silk, Red Steel
by Narilsa
Summary: Fifty themes, fifty sentences: Kuchiki Byakuya. Done on a whim for the LJ community 1character.


White Silk, Red Steel

**#01 - Snow**  
The last snow of the season wrings a dry cough from Hisana, and he kisses her as if the gesture could pull the chill from her lungs.

**#02 - Child**  
Byakuya had wanted a child, but the only thing Hisana could give him was a miscarriage.

**#03 - Brick**  
He heats smooth bricks for their bed every night, but nothing warms her blood enough to blush it back to her ashen skin.

**#04 - Judgment**  
The final decision concerning Rukia's sentence punches straight into his chest: a kind but misplaced tracheotomy to compensate for his strangled throat.

**#05 - Powder**  
These days, most of the spirits he cleanses died violently and linger vengefully: chained to the guns that killed them, faded powder still ringing their bullet wounds.

**#06 - Grim**  
Grim-faced, distant, and silent, Byakuya reassures none of the souls he reaps.

**#07 - Trap**  
A single encounter seals his fate, traps him between Hisana and Rukia: leads him down a path to two sisters who will come to rule his locked heart.

**#08 - Star**  
The dog may seem to howl at the moon's cold white back, but what he truly seeks is the star beyond.

**#09 - Possession**  
To possess that star, he must first pass the sentinel moon.

**#10 - Bandage**  
Hisana cared for him once, in the third year of their marriage: changing the bandages upon his wounds with coarsened, gentle hands.

**#11 - Pearl**  
She never wore finery, and eschewed even the plainest pearls: but he loved her even at her most unadorned, and did not initially understand why the fact sometimes saddened her.

**#12 - Glass**  
He handled no glassware as gently as he did the delicate column of Hisana's throat.

**#13 - Classified**  
Byakuya receives his order to retrieve Kuchiki Rukia in a sealed and tight-rolled scroll; when he opens the classified document, Renji tries in vain to read it through the look in his captain's impassive eyes.

**#14 - Buttons**  
On the rare occasions he uses a gigai, he wears white dress shirts with the top two buttons undone.

**#15 - Closet**  
When closeted within his estate, untroubled by the demands of the external world, he is capable of being completely absorbed for hours in such little things as the strokes of calligraphy or the steeping of tea: in the painted curve of his wife's throat, when he visits her shrine.

**#16 - Ash**  
Spirits leave no body when they die, and so nothing is ever buried beneath those stone markers; needing more, he burned her clothes and buried the ashes.

**#17 - Definition**  
When Senbonzakura first manifests, he catches only a fleeting and peripheral glimpse of her: lacking definition, lacking detail, and lacking pity for his yearning gaze.

**#18 - Staircase**  
As he pulls his hair up into the kenseikan, an intricate part staircases into being: a crooked white lightning bolt, reflected in wellwater hair.

**#19 - Nail**  
Flaked bone touches taut silk, and a slight press flicks a shivering note from the koto's string: the sound coaxing a matching tremble from the woman in his arms.

**#20 - Prey**  
Those that preyed upon Rukia always found themselves preyed upon in turn: seized and flayed in an instant by a thousand vengeful blades.

**#21 - Backwards**  
The senka is a backwards iai cut: a stroke for the back driven by a reverse grip.

**#22 - Trouble**  
When he was young, he never got into any trouble that could not somehow be traced back to Yoruichi.

**#23 - Little**  
Everything about her is little: little hands, little body, little sighs beneath the sheets when they move together, skin to skin.

**#24 - Collar**  
Byakuya can look at Rukia only long enough to see the criminal's collar banding her throat-- to see her lips, parted and sad around the syllables of his name-- before he must turn his face aside.

**#25 - Circle**  
Human souls here do not exalt so much as they recycle: circling through a path of death and rebirth, from which Kuchiki Byakuya has thus far stood apart.

**#26 - Hands**  
Rukia touches Byakuya for the first time when she accepts his offered hand, and she is almost surprised to find him warm and real: to feel a human beat of blood in his wrist.

**#27 - Freedom**  
Staring down the black length of Tensa Zangetsu, he follows its uncompromising lines to Ichigo's eyes; and in a single, blade-breaking moment of distraction, he must tell himself he does not envy the complete freedom of choice there.

**#28 - Last**  
When Rukia was admitted as a Kuchiki, the clan whispered behind screens and fans that Byakuya's father would be the last great Kuchiki head: for the clan would diminish beneath this insolent son's rule.

**#29 - Scab**  
Given enough time, even memories scab over; he lives in fear of forgetting her voice.

**#30 - Crown**  
The kenseikan are not particularly heavy, but he wears the white jade pieces as if they were a weighted crown.

**#31 - Time**  
The modern world subdivides time into smaller and smaller pieces, growing heavy with the anxious consciousness of every lost second; but Kuchiki Byakuya still marks the passage of time by the change of the seasons.

**#32 - Rice**  
He neither likes nor dislikes rice, consuming it almost perfunctorily-- until it is topped with something spicy enough to strip the tongue from the mouth.

**#33 - Worn**  
The handkerchief is worn, frayed about the edges, faded from sun and long service: but he carries it close to his heart, for it was hers.

**#34 - Paint**  
Byakuya grinds his own ink for sumi-e, the circular motions loosening his wrist for the strokes; when he finally picks up the brush, simple flicks unfold bamboo that nods and bends across the paper.

**#35 - Ache**  
Sometimes he aches to count all the ways Rukia resembles Hisana-- to memorize all the ways she does not-- but he is not ready, and so instead he turns his back.

**#36 - Cherry**  
Senbonzakura's thousand blades scissor through the silence, moving so swiftly they split wind into the harmonic sound of a finger tracing the edge of a wineglass.

**#37 - Library**  
In the library of the Kuchiki estate hangs a great scroll that records the clan's genealogy: looking at it, Byakuya reflects on how strange it is that the two most important names in his life are not inked upon it.

**#38 - Win**  
A single instant of doubt, of reluctance, of hope-- that moment of indecision was enough to hollow out the power of his blade, and he concedes victory to Ichigo with no particular rancor.

**#39 - Loss**  
He remains by her bedside, head bowed, eyes blank, confused with loss: still holding her hand, long after it stopped holding his.

**#40 - Fold**  
A mental exercise, for untroubled sleep: at night, he folds his hakama, and pictures folding his doubts away into the silk.

**#41 - Music**  
Silk strings and snakeskin cannot match her plaintive voice.

**#42 - Bell**  
The seven flowers of autumn sway in the gardens, washed by the rain and bent by the wind; he picks a kikyou, and tastes winter in the air.

**#43 - Sleep**  
The Kuchiki lord and lady do not share the same bed: a time-honored tradition he quietly defies.

**#44 - Contact**  
Knelt behind her to teach her the koto, he leans over her left shoulder, a brush of lips warming the soft hollow hidden just beneath her cheekbone: his hands on strings, his mouth on her skin.

**#45 - Electricity**  
The twisting roar of lightning holes Ichigo's shoulder, and for an instant Byakuya almost pities the boy for dying so far from home.

**#46 - Milk**  
After over a century of absence from it, Yoruichi steps paw once more within the Kuchiki estate; she wakes Byakuya with whiskers in his face-- an echo of old games-- and with fraying tolerance he sends for a dish of milk.

**#47 - Wild**  
A frenzied dedication to Rukia smolders plain in Renji's wild eyes; seeing it, Byakuya rewards him by letting him die with an intact face.

**#48 - Expectation**  
Even without the pressure from his disapproving clan-- who stand unanimous in their protectiveness of the Kuchiki name's esteem-- Byakuya's expectations of Rukia would still be exactingly high.

**#49 - Mechanism**  
She is the nightingale of the wild places, winging in from his kingdom's very borders; her voice comes softly through his window, and no mechanical songbird can break his thrall to her.

**#50 - Finale**  
Speared on Shinsou, tasting blood, his only concern is whether his body was enough to keep the long blade from her skin.


End file.
